What's the best strategy for dealing with old ripoff reports that dominate your name rankings?
-
We are just now starting to work on our site optimization. There are a lot of old ripoff reports and other complaints that surface, specifically around our name search. Our competitors use this commonly and our clients come accross regularly. We have made management changes, and real changes in the business since then, but we don't know the best way to get our positive news to replace old negative news. Any ideas? Specifics would be great. Thanks,
-
How to deal with the complaint directly is a loaded question.
CMC-SD makes valid points... Social media profiles are an easy thing to start off with if you don't already have them. Profiles on websites of professional organization that you belong to can be helpful as well. You also want to build links to these profiles to increase the chance that they show up higher in the SERPs.
Paid advertising on your own brand name can help in a small way in these sense that it will push the organic search results down (assuming your paid ad shows above the organic results), and this measure can oftentimes result in the ripoff report link being pushed below the scroll. If someone is searching on your brand name, most people won't have a need to scroll down.
If it's a really popular ripoff report, there may be links to that individual report that are allowing it to rank higher which will just fuel the fire. You might not be able to get any type of satisfaction from Ripoff Report of the author of the report, but if you use OSE to check out where the links are coming from, there may be an opportunity to contact a webmaster site/owner and convince them to remove the link to the report.
-
"Always respond (politely, professionally, and accurately) to complaints on ripoff/review sites that allow a response."
I respectively disagree. You'll wind up getting a response from the poster most likely and go back and forth with the person online instead of via email and creating more content on that page and Google will push that page higher in the results!Also, once higher more people see it and might chime in as well.
If you feel you must respond don't write it with any of your keywords or company name!
Try to get other content to push it down, ripoff report will never remove your page unless you sue.
-
The general idea is to own the top 7-10 results, since most searchers don't click through to page 2. Make sure you have an active brand page on every social network imaginable. The search engines often rank those well for company name searches. If that's not enough to push the bad reviews to page 2, then you should think about PR opportunities. Can you get some neutral or favorable news coverage?
Always respond (politely, professionally, and accurately) to complaints on ripoff/review sites that allow a response. Honestly, an irate, unreasonable complaint that has a good response can make your business look great. I'm a compulsive Yelp user and I see that all the time there. A company that acknowledges its mistakes and bends over backwards to fix those mistakes is a company I'm happy to work with.
Make sure your site has lots of trust signals. If someone is dubious when they get to your site, the BBB logo can nudge them in a more positive direction. Create a page that details your customer service policies -- returns, refunds, etc. You might want to work this content into cart and checkout pages (assuming it's an e-commerce site).
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should I let 22-year-old website go or revamp it?
Hi, I’m trying to decide whether to renew annual hosting for my old website and hoping a wiser brain than mine in these matters might be able to advise me. The website was the home of a weekly website review column, e-newsletter, content writing tips and other web content/marketing related content so has lots of backlinks since 1997, though hasn't been updated for about 10 years. The domain email address is listed on some spam lists as I suspect it was harvested from the site by crawling spambots. I haven't bothered trying to de-list as don't use the address or website anymore. The site has never been used for PBN or sending spam (at least not by me). There's lots of good content in there, and some would still be relevant, but not sure if it's worth keeping for backlinks and for redirecting to my new website when it’s built. Plan to build a new WordPress website for my new writing as no longer in the content marketing business. It's a country-specific domain so can't really sell it as need to own the business name to own the domain name. I no longer use the business name either as plan to set up new brand for new website. But it might be useful to direct traffic to my new website domain once it's up and running if I cleaned up all the many broken links to expired websites in the databases of hundreds of website reviews. It's all on archive.org but I'm still very attached to the old site, even if it's no longer useful from a business point of view. Did a Moz check which showed: Domain Authority
Branding | | brizc
20 Linking Domains
89 Discovered in the last 60 days
1 Lost in last 60 days
4 Inbound Links
1.9k Ranking Keywords
0 My web host stats show the site gets between 300 and 500 visits a month. Had about 138,200 visits since October last year. And about 653,200 hits. Is that amount of traffic worth the time and expense of pruning the site of hundreds of expired links and fixing up other glitches? It's very dated in design and layout and is written in .asp I could send you the URL in private message if you would like to look at the website first. Been agonising over this decision for months as budget is very tight but don’t want to lose the site if it might have future value. Would greatly appreciate advice from someone who's up on this stuff as I've been out of the game for a long time and the deadline to renew the site hosting is very soon. Thank you in advance for your time and help.0 -
Standardising of Company Name Across The Web Question
Good Morning All There are two variations of our company name on the website. Sometimes the name is listed as "name and name" and sometimes listed as "name & name" The domain is obviously www.nameandname.co.uk I believe I am correct in saying that we would be wise to go through and standardise, using one form or the other? Secondly, my main question is would we be wise to use "name and name" as the default, as the word "and" and not the symbol "&" is in the domain itself? Many Thanks
Branding | | ruislip180 -
A problem when our brand name is searched
We have an issue in that when someone enters our new brand name "68 degrees creative" into google.com.au, the following results show: http://postimg.org/image/8x2id4ta9/ The second result is the Linked In page for Hiroshi. This is a person that was part of our old business but is no longer part of the new business (68 degrees creative). And therefore, his LinkedIn profile should not be appearing for this search as he has nothing to do with the new brand. In his LinkedIn profile, he has made no mention of our organisation 68 degrees creative. He also does not feature on our website: www.68degrees.com.au. We can therefore only conclude that the reason he is appearing for the search "68 degrees creative" is that Google has somehow connected him with the new organisation due to previous online ties and relationships which Google has determined by virtue of that associated him with the new organisation. We are ultimately unsure what their algorithm is in establishing this. Is there any way in which we can change this? We don't want his LinkedIn profile appearing when our company name is searched when he has not part of the company. Any help here would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
Branding | | Gavo0 -
Facebook name change error
I keep getting "The Page name you entered does not meet our guidelines. Please review our Page name policies." My name change is well within policy. The page has about 400 fans. I am literally changing a minor aspect. Getting rid of a plural word. Any work around since facebook's site is not working for this?
Branding | | Atomicx0 -
Experience/suggestions in redirecting old URLs (from an existing site) to new URLs under a new domain
Please share your experiences/suggestions in redirecting a set of pages (10,000 or more pages/URLs) from an existing domain to new URLs under a new domain. Thanks in advance!
Branding | | esiow20130 -
Is there any downside to have a product name (branded keyword) that has a top keyword in it?
The company I work for recently purchased another company. We are currently re-branding their product into our solution offering and are working on coming up with a new product name, while keeping SEO in mind. The product names that we are thinking of also includes a non-branded keyword that we actively look to rank for. We currently rank relatively high for this keyword. Is there any negative to having a product name that has a non-branded keyword in it. My first thought is that it is great because that non-branded keyword will be used repeatedly on our site when we mention the product. Things that I don't know though are: will it appear we are keyword stuffing does Google recognize that its a branded keyword and doesn't rank us for the non-branded aspect Any feedback or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Vince
Branding | | IFSNA0 -
Web Strategy Conundrum
I run a business that offers eco friendly screen printing. Let's call it ECO SHIRT SHOP. We offer a specialized type of printing thru the website, then contract to printers throughout the US to execute the printing. (They each have their own distinct print businesses that they operate as well.) As of now we only divulge that we have print facilities in places like chicago, seattle, etc. but do not display addresses as we do not want to confuse customers. By not displaying these addresses, I feel we are missing huge opportunities to be listed by services like Yelp, Google places, etc - consequentially losing highly convertible geography specific search traffic. Ques: The print shops are open to us displaying facility address info, even somehow saying that Print Shop X prints for the ECO SHIRT SHOP network. I want to be transparent with customers and get more localized traffic, but don't want to confuse operations or give away business. For all you strategy guru's out there, how would you handle this? I am at a cross roads, and how we move forward is hugely important for the future of our business. Thanks, as always for your thoughts on this.
Branding | | peteandmikey0 -
Will the word arse in a domain name cause a problem
I have a customer that wants to use the domain name cooksarse.com, what my concern is that the word arse may cause him problems with search engines, even get flaged as Adult content, or family filters. The site is a fun social site and nothing about it you couyld not talk about in church except the name of the site and domain. "cooks arse" am i being overly concerned or could this be a problem
Branding | | AlanMosley0